Teen-aged boys and young men become enraged when they don’t enjoy the power and control over their lives that is the birthright of men, especially white men, in our culture. … Congresswoman Giffords had committed the status offense of being a powerful woman, and the powerless Loughner needed to punish her.
By Lisa Nuss
USA Today marked the anniversary of the Arizona shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and many bystanders, last week with a headline that read, “Tragedy Beyond Words.”
I have words. Four words precisely. I’ve been holding onto these four words over the year since the madman shot Congresswoman Giffords in the face in Tucson: Male Violence Against Women. I presumed the issue would surface. I waited… and waited. I’ve yet to find one major media outlet to mention, let alone consider, that what has been labeled a “senseless” act of violence actually fits an all too-familiar pattern: frustrated male entitlement attempting to reassert itself by punishing female encroachers.
Male violence against women is not my specialty, so I don’t have all of the data at my fingertips. But I live in this culture and I read the newspaper – one would have to deliberately ignore the periodic reports not to know this is an essential feature of our culture. How could you not know that at least 20% of women will be the victim of male violence – that’s 1 in 5; many estimates are as high as 1 in 4, or 1 in 3. And for those who are experts – who run national women’s organizations, or who are journalists in these fields – how can you not have analyzed this dynamic of the Arizona shooting?
None of the initial theories about the shooting made any sense. Many rushed to blame Arizona’s infamous anti-immigration policies. But how is that logical? A man from a border state working a grudge against Latinos, takes out his anger on -- a white woman?
The National Organization for Women also tried to make it about politics, condemning “right-wing opponents of those who support progressive solutions to our country’s challenges.” Another right-wing, anti-federal government guy takes out his anger out -- on a woman? The Oklahoma City bombers were part of that group, and they took aim squarely at a federal government building. But women comprise less than 17% of the U.S. Congress, which ranks the U.S. 69th in the world for its representation of women in government. If you have a problem with our federal government, women should be the least of your worries.
Most disturbing was the shocking attempt by incorrectly self-labeled “progressives,” – many who were zealous Obama supporters – to blame Sarah Palin for the mass shootings. What was the theory there? A young man shows his solidarity with a powerful white woman by punishing a powerful white woman?
All of those popular early ideas turned out to be nonsense -- the craziest kind of yellow, tabloid journalism nonsense. Within weeks, it was clear the guy wasn’t political at all. He may have picked up vague phrases from random fringe groups here and there, but there was no dogmatic message he carried to support any of those theories.
A Very Personal Act
With egg on the face of most major media outlets who ran this drivel, and having failed to find an angle to exploit, most quickly lost interest and wrote it down to lack of mental health treatment. But that didn’t sit right with me. Random mentally ill white guy randomly plans to shoot a powerful white woman in the face, for no reason?
Anyone who watches “Criminal Minds” knows that shooting someone in the face is a very personal act. This shooting was not the cool act of a passive-aggressive disgruntled person. Those guys plant bombs, or start fires, or send anthrax through the mail. Those randomly disgruntled guys choose violence by proxy—they set up a distance between themselves and the brutality.
This guy more closely fit the profile of the high school shooters. I went to college in Eugene, Oregon, which neighbors Springfield -- the site of the 2000 Thurston High School massacre by Kip Kinkel. Coming a year after Columbine, people struggled to make sense of it. Loughner was a few years older than the school shooters, but he seems a lot like them: middle-class white boys working a grudge against the world.
Aggrieved Entitlement
Soon after the Springfield shootings, I found an essay that provided the first explanation for the school shootings that made sense to me: aggrieved entitlement. The perpetrators of mass shootings are almost always young, middle-class white guys – they’re not impoverished, they have access to good schools and, on the surface, stable families.
A similar theory to the one I read in that essay is explained by sociologist Michael Kimmel. He writes that it may be typical for adolescents to feel aggrieved, but “What transforms the aggrieved into mass murderers is also a sense of entitlement.” The mentally fragile follow cultural norms when they break-- girls and women punish themselves (e.g., cutting) while boys and men punish others.
Teen-aged boys and young men become enraged when they don’t enjoy the power and control over their lives that is the birthright of men, especially white men, in our culture. As Kimmel writes, “Aggrieved entitlement is a gendered emotion, a fusion of that humiliating loss of manhood and the moral obligation and entitlement to get it back.”
As soon as it surfaced that the Tucson shooter Jared Loughner wasn’t political at all, I sensed in my gut this was a crime born of white male entitlement. Without being a criminal psychology expert, this was the only explanation that jibed with the facts we knew. He didn’t plant a bomb at Congresswoman Giffords' office, or try to poison her – he used a gun, as an extension of his own hand, to brutalize her. You don’t do that if you disagree with someone’s political philosophy; you do that if someone’s very existence threatens your own. Giffords had committed the status offense of being a powerful woman, and the powerless Loughner needed to punish her.
History of hostility to women in power
Then I found a sidebar in People Magazine’s January 31, 2011, issue that confirmed my suspicions. Under a picture of Loughner, titled “A Ticking Bomb,” the piece covered Loughner’s raging temper, noting that he held particular rage for female customers, his mother, and his former girlfriend.
Later, I found out the New York Times ran a profile of Loughner on January 15, 2011, with similar statements. The authors noted Loughner was “contemptuous of women in positions of power” and that he once told a female bank teller that women had no business holding a position of authority. And yet, even with those observations, the New York Times lead its article with the declaration that Loughner was a puzzle. The New York Times claimed to find no pattern: “Instead, the pattern of facts so far presents only a lack of one.”
You don’t have to be a criminal profiler to see the pattern of hostility to powerful women. It is odd that criminal procedural shows have topped Nielsen ratings for years, yet a country obsessed with criminal profiling couldn’t piece together a theory of male entitlement. With all the possible motives entertained, it didn’t occur to the New York Times to float white male entitlement as just one possibility?
Speaking of profiling, when you consider whose names appear on the masthead of the New York Times, the reason it and other major media outlets have been in willful denial of that possibility becomes slightly, err, obvious.
One has to acknowledge white male entitlement before one can present it as a possible motive. And if the white men who have and continue to run the major media outlets can’t bring themselves to acknowledge their own entitlements, it would be incumbent on the few women who have trickled up to the opinion pages and editorial boards to do the favor for them. But the female apologists who masquerade as opinion columnists have obviously won their powerful positions with tacit promises never to challenge the powerful.
Even the FBI can’t bring itself to make this acknowledgement of white male entitlement. Its lengthy profile page of high school shooters mentions the words “male” and “entitlement” exactly once each, without connecting the two. And yet, on a quick Google search, I found a gaggle of books and articles with rich detail on the topic.
That our liberal opinion columnists – female and male – overwhelmingly tried to blame a woman, Sarah Palin, for what statistically is more likely garden variety male violence against women, is a sign of particularly sick denial. A denial that rages out of control in our culture and is reflected in our media.
Not only must the possibility of aggrieved male entitlement be examined in the Giffords Tucson shooting, but the wholesale refusal to see that as a possible motive must now be examined as well.
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